Should folks who want to set up a “Take one, return one” free mini-lending library outside their houses or along the side of the road require a permit? Conor Friedersdorf, in the February 20, 2015 issue of the Atlantic, has a report of the problems that people young and old have had with local zoning ordinances when they simply wanted to help their neighbors share books.
The editor of a Wikipedia article on medical devices discovered attempts to change the description of 13WSZXDE45TFCkyphoplasty, a back procedure, from “controversial” to “well documented and studied.” The writer was an employee of a company that manufactured the (expensive) device. So begins an Atlantic article by Joe Pinsker on “paid editing” of Wikipedia articles, and what it means for reliability of information.
(theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/)
The National Library of Iraq in Baghdad is digitizing it’s collection, including many documents from the Ottoman period. According to an article in Lebanon’s The Daily Star (August 5, 2015), the project has taken on urgency because of the threat to the holdings by the current insurgency, which has already resulted in the destruction of books and manuscripts in Mosul. Thousands of documents from the National Library were lost following the US-led invasion in 2003.
Fifty-four percent of ebook buyers sometimes read on their smartphones, according to a Nielsen survey in late 2014, up from twenty-four percent in 2012. Fourteen percent 2012 read primarily on their phones.